What is Page 2? Page 2 is a compilation of stories and news tidbits, which for whatever reason, didn’t make the front page of /Film. After the jump we’ve included 20 different items, fun images, videos, casting tidbits, articles of interest and more. It’s like a mystery grab bag of movie web related goodness. If you have any interesting items that we might’ve missed that you think should go in /Film’s Page 2 – email us!

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Thanks to DVD, compression software and services like YouTube and Vimeo, technology has changed the way we ingest visual content. But it hasn’t done as much as I’d like to the way we understand it.

Take the Everything is a Remix project, by editor Kirby Ferguson. The second installment was released this week, and it is a slick, well-written and edited piece of work that points out how much of the entertainment we consume is related to other entertainment. Specifically, it breaks down parts of Star Wars and Kill Bill into component elements, presenting scenes from those films alongside the original images re-purposed by George Lucas and Quentin Tarantino. But I’m left wanting more.

Watch both this film-centric second installment and a sidebar dissection of Kill Bill after the break, then hit the comments for a discussion of how the mechanism of influence from one film to another really affects storytelling. Read More »

If you’ve seen more than one movie by Quentin Tarantino, then you’ve surely noticed his signature POV trunk shot. The shot even has its own wikipedia page (take that Scorsese Squeeze!). Here is the background from wiki:

The Trunk shot is a camera angle used in cinema when one or more characters need to retrieve something or someone from the trunk of a car. … This camera angle is often noted to be the trademark of film maker Quentin Tarantino who disputes that he puts the shot in his films as a trademark and simply asks “Where would you put the camera?” Although he did not invent it, Tarantino popularized the trunk shot, which is featured in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, and Kill Bill. In Death Proof, Tarantino’s traditional shot looking up at the actors from the trunk of a car is replaced by one looking up from under the hood. In Inglourious Basterds a “trunk shot” is used two times when Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) crouches over a captured Nazi with one of his soldiers, cutting a swastika into their victim’s forehead (the shot is supposed to be the victim’s point of view).

After the jump you can see an image that collects all of Tarantino’s Trunk Shots. It first appeared on Reddit but has been making its way around the interwebs yesterday.

“Telephone,” the newly released and incredibly hyped music video from avant-garish pop star Lady Gaga, sees her teaming Thelma and Louise-style with Beyonce in the hot yellow Pussy Wagon from Kill Bill. Why? We guess it’s relative to Gaga’s appreciation for renegade female empowerment, something Quentin Tarantino‘s bloody classic expresses like few films before or since.

According to Wikipedia, it’s the same Pussy used in the film, which, if memory serves, remains proudly owned by QT. Over the vid’s nine minutes, the truck gets more than a cameo, including a close-up of the name plate key chain in the ignition. The vid is also infused with a somewhat dated hyper-Japanese street culture sensibility that begs the question: why didn’t QT direct the video and knock it out of the park? Surely he would have been into the idea. Insert: priceless shots of bedazzled Gaga toes. Also, QT would have made sure the video—which doesn’t hit the 2010 epic wow mark—had tighter editing.

Another movie the vid pays homage to in its first mins is Caged Heat, the catty 1974 women-in-prison grindhouse flick directed by Jonathan Demme and produced by Roger Corman (recent recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Oscar). It’s also interesting to see the stylistic influence of Eric Wareheim, of [adult swim]’s Tim and Eric, shine through in scenes with bad-cable-signal effects and schizo flourishes lifted from his cooler music videos for Major Lazer and other artists. The entire video and more screenshots after the jump. We welcome your thoughts.

We have the intersection between famous people and crazy people to thank for no small amount of entertainment. Take the lawsuit filed by Dannez Hunter, who claims that in 1999 he submitted a story treatment to Miramax about a character named Ren. Hunter claims that Ren became O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill, and that Quentin Tarantino stole elements of his treatment, including the specific manner of murder of Ren’s mother.

But it gets better, because Hunter also applied for a job at Miramax, and was, ahem, “never given a return phone call, as numerous similar situated less qualified Jewish and White people were bestowed job after job after job.” He wants a bag full of money, in part because whites and jews got all the royalties from Kill Bill. Good luck with this one, buddy. [TMZ]

After the break something slightly more substantive but less amusing: Tarantino reportedly may make a Harvey Weinstein documentary. Read More »

Jeff Wells has posted three awesome clips of Quentin Tarantino telling stories from the Directors on Directing panel in Santa Barbara this weekend. I’ve embedded all three after the jump. The first clip is about how directors raise the bar on each other and Tarantino recounts a story Brian DePalma told him about Martin Scorsese and Blow Out vs. Raging Bull. The second story is about how he had to prove himself the first week directing Reservoir Dogs. And the third story is about how James Cameron‘s Avatar might have affected Kill Bill if it had been released first. I could listen to Tarantino tell his stories all day long (which reminds me, why doesn’t XM/Sirius hire this guy to do a weekly one-hour satellite radio show?) Watch the clips after the jump.

There’s been even more gossip about a projected third Kill Bill film from Quentin Tarantino than about his long-delayed Whole Bloody Affair recut of the first two parts. The latest loose-lipped culprit to go sowing wild rumours is Daryl Hannah.

Hannah was speaking to UK TV channel Film 24 about her role in Raoul Ruiz’ A Closed Book when they got her on the topic of Tarantino’s Bride movies. In the first two films she played Elle Driver, the eye-patched Deadly Viper Assassin that we last saw losing her one good peeper. It was safe to assume she’d been offed, though apparently that’s not Daryl’s take. She told the channel:

He always meant it as a trilogy… Think about it. There’s always been a tradition of blind Samurais and you never actually saw her expire in the other film.

Does this mean we’re any closer to a Kill Bill threeque or spin-offl? Probably not, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out her comments on the blind samurai role were actually founded in something Tarantino has told her.

Toronto based designer/art directorIbraheem Youssef created these wonderful minimalistic pieces of poster art for the films of Quentin Tarantino., including Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Check out all of the posters in full, after the jump.Read More »

When a new film from Quentin Tarantino is released, a film as original and awash in genre-geometry as Inglourious Basterds, the post-viewing sensation that follows remains difficult to describe. In Kill Bill Vol. 1, there is a scene set inside the House of Blue Leaves in which Uma Thurman’s Bride blinks and the film switches from black and white to color. A sizable light switch is then thrown by a yakuza. In seconds, the screen turns a cool midnight blue. At that moment the aural equivalent of digital goosebumps chimes unusually through the speakers. Now everything on screen appears the same but is different, renergized and alive. I remember watching this scene and realizing that it inexplicably captures how I feel after a QT film; the difference being that the sensation of a QT film is not flicked instantaneously; it spreads over the following weeks and months as if by a potent time-release capsule. In addition, as this sensation is occuring at a personal level, Tarantino’s characters and images are similarly infiltrating and titillating the collective mind of endless media, fellow cinephiles, and general moviegoers. Pop-culture synapses connect further until a single Tarantino character is loaded into the permanent highlight reel of a respective year, for film or otherwise. It’s the lysergic, symbiotic propaganda of a true genius.

In this way, Inglourious Basterds is no different from Tarantino’s superlative works: the character that will be remembered in bold fashion is Colonel Hans Landa aka The Jew Hunter, the primary villain in Basterds. Moreover, international viewers, and American viewers especially, will come to remember their surprise introduction to the masterful talent embodying Landa, the Austrian actor Christoph Waltz. His career spanning some 30 years, primarily in theatre and television, Waltz’s performance as the erudite, calculating, and predatory Nazi colonel—a fictional Tarantino creation—is all but guaranteed a Best Supporting Actor nomination. This /Film staffer predicts “a bingo.” If a timely parallel need be drawn to exemplify the breakout performance by this veteran actor—a role that plants the seeds for a long, prosperous career—it would be that of Jackie Earle Haley inLittle Children. During his whirlwind of publicity, Quentin Tarantino, doting even for Tarantino, has praised Waltz and his character with the following…

“You gave me my movie.” – to Waltz at the Cannes Film Festival, where he won Best Actor

“Hans Landa is one of the greatest characters I have ever written, and one of the greatest characters that I will ever write.”